OBJECTIVES We sought to estimate the effect of Connecticut's implementation of a handgun permit-to-purchase law in October 1995 on subsequent homicides. METHODS Using the synthetic control method, we compared Connecticut's homicide rates after the law's implementation to rates we would have expected had the law not been implemented. To estimate the counterfactual, we used longitudinal data fr...

An incident recently occurred at an outpatient imaging center in western New York State, in which a firearm spontaneously discharged in a 1.5-T MR imaging environment with active shielding. To our knowledge, this is the first documented case of such an occurrence. The event confirms previously reported theoretic risks of a firearm discharging in an MR imaging environment [1]. In this report, we...

In District of Columbia v. Heller, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Second Amendment protects an individual's right to own handguns in the home for protection, invalidating a Washington, D.C. law banning most handgun possession. The Heller decision, however, provided lower courts with little guidance regarding how to judge the constitutionality of gun laws other than handgun bans. Neverthe...

Deadly force research typically does not distinguish between shootings by on-duty and off-duty police. This article uses Philadelphia police shooting data from two time periods (1970-1978 and 1987-1992) and a unique quasi-experimental design to examine the comparative effects upon on- and off-duty police shootings of an administrative policy that limited police shooting discretion but that did ...

Acknowledgements We would like to thank all the staff in the local and county law enforcement agencies in Palm Beach County who were extremely cooperative in supplying data on violent arrests and spent numerous hours in their already busy schedules to compile this critical information. Also, we want to thank the Palm Beach County Medical Examiner's Office who was gracious enough to share their ...

The American Psychiatric Association, ("APA"), with more than 36,000 members at present, is the Nation's leading organization of physicians who specialize in psychiatry. APA provides for education and advocacy and develops policy through Position Statements. It promotes enhanced knowledge of particular topics relevant to psychiatric practice and patient care through Resource Documents. Since 19...

INTRODUCTION Firearm violence injures or kills 100,000 Americans each year. This paper applies the Host-Agent-Vector-Environment model to this issue. Research on firearm violence tends to focus on two elements-the host (i.e., victims of firearm violence) and the environment (i.e., gun policies)-but little attention has been paid to the agent (the gun and ammunition) or the vector (firearm manuf...

Rarely has the field of marketing thought been closely associated with the topic of citizens’ use of firearms in the United States, but it is now at the center of interest in this controversial and multifaceted area. Public policy has not yet resolved the challenges from conflicts among personal freedoms, fundamental rights, deaths, pain, and huge dollar expenditures to address the problems fro...